The Prince George Citizen is once again locally owned.
The announcement was made this morning (Thursday): former City Councillor Cameron Stolz has purchased the 108-year-old newspaper from its parent company Glacier Media.
“Last fall, we saw local media was disappearing off the landscape,” he said, citing Kamloops This Week and newspapers in Fort St. John and Dawson Creek. “The loss of the Citizen would be detrimental to the city.”
He said he reached out to Glacier in early November to inquire about the future of the Citizen.
“I am very proud of the work that the Prince George Citizen has done over the years,” Stolz said. “I appreciate that the Citizen sometimes offends and oppresses half the population, but they’ve always been there in our community and are a big part of the history of the City of Prince George.”
He said the Citizen’s existing staff has all been offered “comparable” contracts to stay on board, and he is not planning any more layoffs.
Editorially, Stolz said he wants to see the paper shift to a pro-business, pro-Prince George, center-right, and solution-based perspective.
More investigative work, especially surrounding elected officials in City Hall, SD57, and the Regional District, is something he also said readers can expect.
Stolz was a two-term Prince George City Councillor who served from 2008-2014. He then unsuccessfully ran for re-election three times in 2014, 2018, and 2022, and is ineligible to run again in 2026.
“Elected officials might see a much more visible presence of reporters attending meetings they are at,” he said. “You are going to see much more accountability on that end of it.”
Stolz also owns Great White Toys, which he started 34 years ago. He said his family moved to Prince George when he was in the first grade and has lived here since.
The weekly print version of the Citizen will also continue, something Stolz said he “does not see changing ever.”
Stolz also revealed the Citizen lost $56,000 last year, and said his purchase of the business is not a “money-making venture,” though he did not say if Glacier had plans on shutting it down entirely.
Ted Clarke has been a news and sports reporter with the Citizen for 30 years.
“It gives us reassurance that the paper is not going anywhere. We have felt for a long time, that a lot of people in the community thought we were going to go down,” he said. “With Cameron buying this paper, we know it is going to survive… all the staff are thrilled that we have this green light to go to our jobs every day.”
Clarke is originally from Calgary, he said when he joined the Citizen “We had well over 100 employees, and still had 100 employees when Glacier took over in 2006. Now, there are about eight or nine.”
He said the Citizen staff was not given any advanced notice of the purchase, they were told about an hour before the official announcement was made.
“I hope this is a sign there are other papers out there that will survive because local owners take interest in keeping news media alive,” Clarke said. “It is critical, we have to hold politicians’ feet to the fire when they are maybe doing things they shouldn’t, and also telling the good news stories out there because there are lots of them.”